A first version of "The Arab Falconer" (Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va.) was included in the Salon of 1863. The present picture was painted the following year. It reverses the composition and differs in its details.

Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], ed. The Art Treasures of America. Philadelphia, [1880], vol. 2, pp. 130, 132, reproduces a drawing similar to our painting, with the horse facing in the same direction, but with the falconer facing forward; locates it in the collection of J. Hobart Warren and notes that it resembles, but does not exactly match, the "Arab Falconer" in the collection of Mr. Wall, Providence (now Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va.).

Charles Sterling and Margaretta M. Salinger. French Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 2, XIX Century. New York, 1966, p. 157, ill., call it one of several repetitions of the 1863 Salon painting (Chrysler Museum).

James Thompson inThe Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse, the Allure of North Africa and the Near East. Ed. Mary Anne Stevens. Exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London. New York, 1984, p. 135, under no. 24 [British edition, "The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse: European Painters in North Africa and the Near East," London, 1984, p. 133, under no. 22], calls it a variant "that lacks the verve and power of the original".

Jefferson C. Harrison. The Chrysler Museum: Handbook of the European and American Collections. Selected Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings. Norfolk, Va., 1991, p. 112.

Patrick Shaw Cable. "From North Africa to the Black Sea: Nineteenth-Century French Orientalist Drawings." Cleveland Studies in the History of Art 7 (2002), pp. 114, 124 n. 44, discusses a watercolor of the falconer (Cleveland Museum of Art) which has the same inversed composition as our painting, suggesting that both works are "replicas Fromentin was encouraged to make because of the immense popularity of [the Salon] picture".

The reception of the original "Arab Falconer" at the Salon of 1863 (now Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va.) led Fromentin to execute several variants, including our painting. A watercolor in the Cleveland Museum of Art has a very similar composition to ours, in reverse. An autograph replica of the Salon painting was sold at Tajan, Paris, November 22, 2004, no. 241.